Hogwarts Legacy: The Harry Potter universe is one of the most popular in pop culture, and for years it was almost universally loved by readers. That is, at least until the author JK Rowling started using her social networks to spread transphobic discourses and values, which naturally left many people confused about what to feel when faced with the brand’s products.
Yesterday (17) we had another edition of the State of Play program, this time dedicated to the new Hogwarts Legacy game, which promises to be one of the main releases of 2022. And the inevitable soon happened: social networks were taken over by the “debate” (if is that you can call a “debate” a festival of people cursing each other non-stop) about the possibility of separating the author from his creation when it’s time to appreciate it.
Video games discover a “new” discussion
To be clear, this discussion is by no means new, and for decades the topic has been discussed in other media such as cinema (think of names like Woody Allen and Roman Polanski) and literature (from Monteiro Lobato to H.P. Lovecraft). Being one of the youngest forms of artistic expression, it’s only natural that video games still have a lot to mature, and that their audience doesn’t quite know how to deal with it yet.
Not by chance, most discussions in the video game world are limited to superficial and simple opinions around already saturated topics such as Ludonarrative Dissonance and the implementation of Easy Mode in order to allow more people to finish them. Like me, you’re probably tired of reading all sides of these debates, and I imagine your diagnosis is also one of regretting the way these conversations hardly ever get anywhere productive.
And that’s exactly why I apologize. I feel that yesterday, accidentally, I may have opened Pandora’s box and helped to put another topic in the eternal cyclical wheel of shallow discussions of the gamer bubble. It all started with a humble tweet that I didn’t expect to get more than my usual 10 or 20 likes, but it ended up becoming my biggest viral on the networks.
